Easy business for MSMEs: Public procurement portal Government eMarketplace (GeM) has reached another milestone of 1 crore total orders processed so far, about a month after its sales base crossed the 40 lakh mark. The number of orders almost doubled from 55.74 lakh orders processed in January 2021, indicating that it took four and a half years, it took the portal to achieve this mark, while the remaining orders came in after only 16 months. GeM had also achieved Rs 1 lakh crore in order value in the financial year 2021-22.
The portal was launched in August 2016 and had processed 1,00,54,211 orders worth 2.44 lakh crore Rs from 60,074 public purchasers, including public entities and government departments, data from the portal showed. Currently, there are almost 43 lakh sellers. The growth was largely seen after Covid, as the government encouraged central and state buyers to digitally purchase goods, including Covid essentials such as PPE sets and masks from MSME vendors.
However, not all 43 lakh sellers may have contributed to the 1 crore order mark. A number of them are inactive sellers and therefore GeM is seeking to delist them, GeM CEO Prashant Kumar Singh told Financial Express Online in an interaction in March this year. “GeM is integrated with the Udyam registration portal, and therefore many sellers were directly registered on our portal because of their Udyam registration. There may also be other sellers who may not be interested in selling on GeM,” Singh had said.
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Not only the sales base, the number of product categories is also trimmed. From around 16,000 categories last year, the number narrowed to 10,143 in March this year, and is currently reduced to 9,702. “We removed about 6,000 categories three months ago that had issues, such as sellers not being on board properly, or there were insignificant sellers or products that were not in demand in those categories,” Singh had added.